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Posts tagged with POETRY

Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMark Rylance at the 2011 Tony Awards, where he recited a poem by Louis Jenkins rather than give a standard acceptance speech.

Mark Rylance has cribbed from the work of Louis Jenkins long enough. Having twice recited compositions by Mr. Jenkins, the mischievous poet of Duluth, Minn., in lieu of more traditional acceptance speeches at the Tony Awards, Mr. Rylance will give him proper credit on a new play they have written together that will make its debut at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis next year.

The play, “Nice Fish,” will be presented as part of the Guthrie’s 2012-13 season, the theater’s representatives said on Monday. It is written by Mr. Jenkins and Mr. Rylance, the “Jerusalem” and “Boeing-Boeing” star, who will also appear in “Nice Fish” and direct it with his wife, Claire van Kampen.

“There’s something unique about America that I find Louis expresses,” said Mr. Rylance, who has lived most of his life in Britain but spent part of his adolescence in Wisconsin. “And sales of his books always go up if I win a Tony.”

Mr. Rylance said in a telephone interview that he first encountered Mr. Jenkins’s poetry in a chapter on zaniness in “The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart,” an anthology edited by Robert Bly, James Hillman and Michael Meade. Read more…

In 1973, reviewing Adrienne Rich’s seventh book of poems, “Diving Into the Wreck,” Margaret Atwood called it “one of those rare books that forces you to decide not just what you think about it; but what you think about yourself. It is a book that takes risks, and it forces the reader to take them also.” Ms. Rich, who died on Wednesday at 82, spent her career forcing such confrontations.

Reviewing “Midnight Salvage,” a collection of Ms. Rich’s poems from the 1990s, for The Times, Matthew Flamm wrote: “Rich’s unwavering passion for a more just world is in constant dialogue with her sense of life’s impossible complexity.” In the last two decades, the paper documented the many awards Ms. Rich received, as well as those she resisted. In 1997, Ms. Rich declined to accept a National Medal for the Arts from President Bill Clinton, saying that art was “incompatible with the cynical politics of this Administration.” She told a reporter, “I am not against government in general, but I am against a government where so much power is concentrated in so few hands.”

Ms. Rich, who published her first book in 1951, made generations of fans. In her new memoir, “Wild,” about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail while grieving over the death of her mother, Cheryl Strayed writes about adding a book of Ms. Rich’s poems to her already dangerously overweight backpack: “I’d read ‘The Dream of a Common Language’ so often that I’d practically memorized it. In the previous few years, certain lines had become like incantations to me, words I’d chanted to myself through my sorrow and confusion. That book was a consolation, an old friend, and when I held it in my hands on my first night on the trail, I didn’t regret carrying it one iota — even though carrying it meant that I could no more than hunch beneath its weight.” Read more…

Over at Language Log, the East Asian studies scholar (and former Ivy League basketball player) Victor Mair discussed the merits of various Chinese translations of Linsanity. The first Mandarin rendition to take hold, “Linfengkuang,” apparently means something like “Insane Lin!,” which is probably not something most Knicks fans want to be shouting. Fortunately, Mr. Mair noted, it was soon overtaken by the more graceful “Linlaifeng,” which is derived from the Chinese expression “renlaifeng,” or “to get hyped up in front of an audience.”

Meanwhile, “Linsanity” has emerged as an early front-runner for the American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year honor. “It’s helpful that his name, Lin, is so simple,” Ben Zimmer, the chairman of the society’s New Words Committee, told Bloomberg. “It lends itself to this type of word play.” (It’s is also less polarizing than “tebowing,” which came in second in the “Least Likely to Succeed” vote at the American Dialect Society’s annual meeting last month, Mr. Zimmer noted.)

But so far, amazingly, no one seems to have written any Lin-ericks, or even used the term. (Maybe some puns really are just too awful?) So we asked the humorist, sportswriter and self-diagnosed hyperlexic Roy Blount Jr. to take a shot, with the following results: Read more…

Before you text “I luv u” to your partner on this Valentine’s Day, you might want to visit the newly digitized collection of correspondence between the Victorian poets Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett for inspiration. (Warning: These letters are likely to make you far less sanguine about your own relationship’s fire.)

Wellesley College and Baylor University collaborated on the project, which began today with more than 1,400 letters by the poets available online. Of those, 573 represent the complete set of love letters, and at least 1,500 additional pieces of correspondence to other people the couple knew are to be up by summer.

Browning wrote first, on Jan. 10, 1845, immediately establishing the intensity that would characterize the relationship:

I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett, and this is no off-hand complimentary letter that I shall write, whatever else, no prompt matter-of-course recognition of your genius and there a graceful and natural end of the thing: since the day last week when I first read your poems, I quite laugh to remember how I have been turning and turning again in my mind what I should be able to tell you of their effect upon me…

Wellesley CollegeElizabeth Barrett’s first letter to Robert Browning, written on Jan. 11, 1845.

Barrett responded just one day later, beginning: “I thank you, dear Mr. Browning, from the bottom of my heart. You meant to give me pleasure by your letter, and even if the object had not been answered, I ought still to thank you. But it is thoroughly answered.”

The relationship inspired Barrett’s most famous sonnet (“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.”), and the letters show just how frequently such passionate sentiments were expressed. A line from Browning’s letter of May 8, 1846, is one example among hundreds like it: “I would die for you, with triumphant happiness, God knows, at a signal from your hand!” They married in 1846, against the strict wishes of Barrett’s father.

“Most researchers want to see the letters in their original state,” said Darryl Stuhr, manager of digitization projects for Baylor’s electronic library. “These digitized letters are as authentic online as if you pulled them out of an envelope.”

Speaking of envelopes, those have also been digitized and added to the viewing experience.

Here’s a rare literary phenomenon: Americans are rushing to read poetry.
One day after Philip Levine was named the next poet laureate, his books have quickly sold out in bookstores and online retailers, making it nearly impossible to immediately acquire copies of some collections of his poems.

On the Amazon.com “Movers and Shakers” list, which tracks books that are growing the most quickly in popularity, two by Mr. Levine were at the top of the list: “What Work Is,” a collection of poems that won a National Book Award, and “The Simple Truth,” a collection that won a Pulitzer Prize. Both books are backordered and not available to ship for at least six days. Other books are backordered for at least one to three weeks.

Bookstores, which have also reported a large number of requests for Mr. Levine’s work, tend to not keep large numbers of poetry books in reserve since sales are generally so modest. A spokeswoman for Knopf said the publisher is rushing to print more copies of his books and expects to meet all of the demand within 10 days.

Mr. Levine, who is 83, has written some 20 collections of poems. For at least one recent collection, “News of the World,” the e-book edition is available immediately.

'Two Voices'

Philip Levine, the new United States poet laureate, grew up in Detroit and lives in Fresno, Calif. As Dwight Garner writes in his appraisal, Mr. Levine is “known for his emphasis on the voice of the ordinary workingman and the industrial heartland.”

All true. But Mr. Levine is also no stranger to New York, as the video above shows clearly. It’s a clip from a 2007 reading at the Library of Congress. The poem, “Two Voices,” recalls a chance encounter — or, rather, non-encounter — in a crowd on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade.

This week: Adam Goodheart on his book “1861: The Civil War Awakening”; excerpts from a panel discussion about the role of poetry in the modern world; Julie Bosman has notes from the field; and Jennifer Schuessler has best-seller news. Sam Tanenhaus is the host. (Podcast Archive)

Even devoted followers of the news seem overwhelmed by the sheer volume of horrific events unfolding just now — in particular the continuing bloodshed in the Arab world and the ever-worsening story of the earthquake-tsunami-nuclear crisis in Japan. These headlines recall the most frightening chapters of antiquity, times of pestilence and war, a steady mood of darkening apocalypse.

Reports From the World of Books

To a great extent, literature has provided us with the imagery and vocabulary of disaster: whether the Bible, with its plagues and floods, its terrible judgments (“Ah sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, a seed of evildoers, children that are corrupters”); or Greek tragedy, with its blood-crimes and murderous revenges.

What follows is a sampler of literary catastrophe. Don’t run away. It’s not as depressing as it sounds. One of the enduring paradoxes of great apocalyptic writing is that it consoles even as it alarms.

This has been, in fact, one of the enduring “social” functions of literature — specifically, of poetry. Narrative prose is less well suited to the task. This isn’t surprising: narrative implies continuity and order — events that flow forth in comprehensible sequence, driven by motive forces of cause and effect. To tell a “story,” whether real or invented, is to presume at least the possibility of rational understanding. Read more…

Attentive ArtsBeat readers must have noticed by now that we can’t resist any excuse to mention our recent Top 10 Composers project. Here we go again.

Dean Rader, an English professor at the University of San Francisco, is doing for poets what our chief music critic, Anthony Tommasini, did for composers: He’s picking history’s 10 best. Writing on SFGate.com, the Web site of The San Francisco Chronicle, Professor Rader says he will “spend the next two weeks taking suggestions, lists, nominations, and justifications for the 10 greatest poets.” Then, he says, he’ll post his own list.

Professor Rader takes on this obviously impossible task in a playful spirit, proposing what he calls a “ridiculous and futile project” to explore a serious question: What makes great poetry great?

Hayes’s work is terrific, and characteristic of a certain strain in contemporary poetry: it’s grounded in narrative even as it’s linguistically dense and playful, with allusions to formal verse traditions and to pop culture new and old. There’s an appealing restlessness and reach and witty musicality to these poets’ work — I’d put Angie Estes and Lucia Perillo in the same category — with meanings that can explode in a thousand directions in every line. As far as I know nobody has grouped them into a “school” yet, like the New York poets or the Language poets, but I like to think of them as the A.D.D. poets, and I’m always on the lookout for their latest offerings. So I’ll be first in line for the winter issue of Ploughshares, which Hayes guest-edited, and in the meantime I’ll point curious poetry fans to poets.org, where they can find a pretty good selection of Hayes reading his own work aloud.